Forty years ago this month, a visitor at the Dallas Cowboys’ cheerleading tryouts described a scene that was “as tense as that at an open casting call for a Broadway production,” with 150 women — “the most envied, celebrated and soughtu2010after” in the country — shivering in an overly air-conditioned room.
The women spoke of starvation diets that had lasted for weeks. The visitor, a New York Times reporter, noted that the cheerleaders were paid next to nothing: $15 a game ($14.72 after taxes). They had stringent practice schedules — as much as five hours a night, five nights a week — and they could not appear where alcohol was served, attend parties of any sort or wear jewelry with their uniforms.